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The Analytical Meltdown Continues

March 03, 2013

"Railing against military incompetence and intelligence failures is no substitute for constructing a policy that recognizes the limitations of armed force and espionage. Though they lack the dramatic appeal of air raids and secret agents, diplomacy and law enforcement must be the cornerstones of any successful attempt to contain international terrorism."

When was this written? Hint: Highlight the spacee underneath the line.

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1989

Source: Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America's War Against Terrorism (Martin and Walcott)

August 23, 2012

In April 2002, the FBI warned banks in northeastern states of a “physical attack”:

"The United States government has received unsubstantiated information that unspecified terrorists are considering physical attacks against US financial institutions in the Northeast -- particularly banks -- as part of their campaign against US financial interests," the FBI said in a statement.

"While the FBI has no information about any specific plot or threats to any specific institution, out of an abundance of caution, an alert has been transmitted to law enforcement and to financial institutions."

It was the second warning of its kind made by federal officials this week. The first was prompted by an anonymous telephone call received Sunday from the Netherlands through Canada that later turned out to be a false alarm.

The alert focused on Washington and the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia.

The FBI said the decision to issue the alert followed was made after if consultations with the Department of Justice, the Office of Homeland Security and the Treasury Department.

Attorney General John Ashcroft explained the US government was not asking the banks to close, or urging people to stay away from them.

"We are alerting law enforcement, financial institutions, and the American people to be vigilant, and to be aware of anything that appears suspicious," he said in a statement. The attorney general said he was not aware of any specific threat to any specific financial institution.

But he pointed out that during the war against terrorism, the United States had developed numerous sources of new information and was constantly analyzing and assessing intelligence received from them.

Ashcroft did not disclose what theses sources of new information were.

But a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the information that prompted the warning came in part from Abu Zubaydah, the suspected chief of al Qaeda operations, who was captured in Pakistan and turned over to US authorities earlier this month.

The official emphasized, however, that the FBI was accurate in qualifying the information it had received was unsubstantiated.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week Zubaydah was "a fountain of knowledge" about al-Qaeda's operations.

Following the warning, a local news station sent a reporter into the branch office of a regional bank on K Street and interviewed the manager about the warning. That warning, like so many to follow, faded into memory. Except, perhaps, for the branch manager who had his 20 seconds of local fame, thanks in part to Abu Zubaydah.

Then in July 2004, Pakistan arrested Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani outside of Rawalpindi, along with 15 other suspects “from Africa.” Along with the suspects, came the requisite laptops and portable drives. Soon after the arrest, authorities recovered reconnaissance reports that made it clear that al-Qaida possessed a well-developed plot to attack “banks.” Not your local branch, however, but major financial institutions like the World Bank.

"This was a planning proposal in the pre-operation phase, including surveillance and plans for attacking. It was typical of a group-level operation that needs to be approved at Bin Laden's level," the source said. It is unclear whether these attacks had been approved.

The buildings apparently named as targets were the Citigroup Centre and the Stock Exchange in New York, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington, and Prudential Financial's headquarters in Newark. Police in each city were searching cars and lorries approaching the buildings yesterday. In New York, the Holland tunnel, leading to Manhattan's financial district, was closed to heavy commercial vehicles.

US intelligence officials quoted in the US press say the new information shows that scouting had been done to identify security in and around these buildings; the best places for reconnaissance; how to make contact with employees who work in the buildings; traffic patterns; and locations of hospitals and police departments.

Some of the reconnaissance was extremely detailed, even including the number of pedestrians who walked past on each side of the street in a minute. Reconnaissance is thought to have been carried out over several years, both before and after the attacks of September 11 2001.

A US intelligence official told the Guardian yesterday the new information provided a "remarkable level of clarity" about al-Qaida operations.

The official, speaking anonymously, said that the new intelligence included "extensive information about activities that have taken place - about the casing and surveillance of the targets, their vulnerabilities and perceived vulnerabilities, the optimal ways to carry out an attack and to bring down buildings, types of security personnel ... it's very detailed."

The intelligence official added: "The indications are that has been a very longstanding effort on the part of al-Qaida. It dated to before September 11, and probably continues to this day."

US officials, quoted in the Washington Post, said that al-Qaida scouts had found that one of the buildings being cased had three male security guards but that only one carried a weapon. "Getting up to the higher floors is not very difficult if you go there midweek, as I did," one of the scouts reported, according to the seized computer files.

The author of those reports? Dhiren Barot, aka Issa al-Hindi. His audience? Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Al-Hindi had UK citizenship, and perfect jihadi credentials. Trained and indoctrinated at LeT camps in Pakistan in the 1990s, he fought Indian troops in Kashmir. He later move on to train in al-Qaida recruits in Afghanistan. Al-Hindi traveled to the US, recorded extensive video of Stock Exchange buildings in New York City. In 1998, Bharot wrote Army of Madinah in Kashmir, an auto-biographical account of his time with the LeT in Kashmir. Al-Hindi was arrested in the UK in August 2004.

In al-Hindi, we see one of the strongest connections between LeT and AQ. However, it's not the only one. Piece together disparate plots from the US, UK and Australia, and a broader (if still unclear) picture hints at a long-term collaborative effort between the two groups. LeT and AQ’s relationship pre-dates 9/11, and suggests a level of cooperation that could be the primary reason AQ survived after the loss of its safe haven in 2001. I wonder if we even considered that contingency before or immediately after the Taliban fell.

Between 2002 and 2008, there were numerous incidence where the open source line between LeT and AQ seemed to blur. KSM dispatched Issa al-Hindi to America to scope out “banks.” Sajid Mir sent Willie Brigitte to Australia. Suspects in Operation Pendennis trained in LeT camps; Hamid Hayat trained in a “militant” camp in Pakistan for an attack on "financial institutions" in the United States. Were these AQ plots? LeT plots? Who was behind this seemingly ongoing effort to create havoc in major western cities? Are they still active?

Were there any operational connections between the plots? Any shared strategy? Shared resources? There’s also this lingering question about Abu Zubaydah and his interrogators. How much did he know about the Banks plot? Was he evading his interrogators in April 2002? Did they misinterpret him? Could we have uncovered it sooner? I doubt there are ready answers to these questions. However, the disparity between what we knew in 2002 and what we discovered in 2004 will always bother me. It represents a dangerous gap in knowledge that may have led to an major terrorist attack had it not been for Ghailani's arrest.

April 22, 2012

Part one of the 2d edition of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s autobiography - Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet (Knights2) - is 560 pages in translation. Written during Zawahiri’s 60th year, the text is a broad, personal look at life inside (what I will call for the sake of this post) the global jihad movement. Its scale challenges the reader to sit and read, closely, its many, somewhat confusing sections, and to think about writer and his reasons for writing. It also challenges the reader to consider why they are reading it.

This may sound like a frivolous academic exercise, but the reasons why we read any jihadi-salafi “text” touch the core of why anyone would study jihadi-salafi movements (jihad studies, for short) in the first place. We read to understand - to make sense of - a phenomenon that touches tens of millions of lives in complex global play of piety, personalities, and geopolitics, the dynamics of which seem to change daily.

I've done close readings on several documents since I starting blogging in 2004, including Hassan al-Banna's Toward the Light, Issa al-Hindi's Army of Madinah in Kashmir, and an unfinished attempt at Martyrs in a Time of Alienation. The goal of close reading a text like Knights2 is to understand the text as it is written. My role as the reader, then, is to simply read closely without prejudice in order to make sense of the text and what it can tell us about its author and the movement he leads.

By contrast, intelligence analysts are trained in what I call “defensive reading.” In intelligence work, an adversary’s media product (text) is scrutinized for any intelligence value. The text is something to be exploited (“mined”) for “actionable intelligence.” To devote months of personal time to a single text in order to build a scholarly understanding would be an unthinkable waste of time and dwindling financial resources. Generally, once a text has been exploited for its intelligence value, analysts never pursue it again.

However, when it comes to reading a long text like Knights2, an analyst is ill-served by their utilitarian tendencies (what I call “analytical utilitarianism”) and professional skepticism. The point of reading a large text like Knights2 isn't to glean "actionable intelligence," but instead to build the analyst's professional knowledge of jihadi-salafi milieu, and to add to their understanding of this remarkable phenomenon -- its history, personalities, and their motivations, etc -- and to share that insight with an interested audience.

The resulting tension between analytical utilitarianism and the kind of qualitative analysis that relies on in-depth knowledge of the jihadi-salafi text remains unresolved at present, posing several challenges.

First, jihad studies lacks a super structure of analytical norms and commonly accepted facts that would distinguish it from other, more established, disciplines. As a result, its practice easily becomes a mishmash of historicism, new historicism, post-colonialism, and amateur exegetical discourse that unconsciously scavenges freely across disciplines but never fits fully into any of them. From the perspective of established disciplines such as sociology or literary criticism, such eclecticism undermines the jihad scholar’s credibility. Jihad studies needs to leave its youthful wandering among the disciplines and find a place of its own.

Without establishing epistemological identity that distinguishes it from other disciplines, such as Middle East Studies, the nascent discipline of jihad studies could be reabsorbed into its multidisciplinary parent sources such as foreign policy or sociology, as students seek to find a job that will provide a paycheck and an opportunity to learn and grow as professionals. Without a distinct identity represented through an association or other types of formal and informal communities, the profession could fade completely as a distinctive elucidative source in foreign, military and public policy. And the jihadi “text” will remain subjected to the whims of analytical utilitarianism.

A second challenge is in the academic institutional culture. In a September 2011 interview at Abu Muqawama, Thomas Hegghammer briefly articulates the extent of the challenges facing jihad studies, specifically United States’ failure to produce a cadre of scholars, drawing from ideas discussed in a 2008 article:

There is a core of specialists who continue to do fantastic work, and we see some new recruitment to the field. But the community is still very small and populated mostly by people who are on the fringes of the academy, institutionally speaking (and that includes myself)......A related problem is that jihadism studies in the US lack an institutional home. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has partly filled this role, but even the CTC has rarely had more than one or two Arabic-speaking al-Qaida specialists based at West Point at any one time; several of the CTC’s best reports were written by off-site contractors. Another potential hub for al-Qaida studies was the Centre on Law and Security at New York University, but it recently scaled down its activities and looks set to close downHow America – with its huge academic workforce and enormous counterterrorism budget – in ten years has failed to produce a research institution with more than two permanent jihadism specialists is beyond me. [emphasis mine]

I share his astonishment. He also identifies one of the primary “disincentives” stifling the development of jihad studies:

The fundamental problem is still the same, namely that the incentive structure in the universities, especially in America, is set against people specialising in the study of jihadi groups. Studying al-Qaida usually involves qualitative methods and requires high-level skills in Arabic or some other oriental language. Graduate students with an interest in jihadism thus work against two strong biases: the quantitative methods hegemony in the social sciences and the skepticism in American Middle East Studies toward the study of hard security issues. These biases affect hiring decisions and have some striking aggregate effects: for example, there are virtually no tenured faculty specialising in terrorism (let alone jihadism) in any Ivy League school or in any Middle East Studies department in America. Rational graduate students with academic ambitions see this and wisely stay clear of the topic.

I would also add to the list of disincentives a third challenge: the paucity of access to jihadi-salafi media. Servers that host the material are attacked, files removed. In some countries, such as Great Britain and soon France, merely reading or keeping copies of this material can be a criminal act. Lack of knowledge of foreign languages such as Arabic is also a barrier, but it goes hand-in-hand with the lack of quality translations. Talented students who may have interest in the topic could be turned off by the frustrating lack of primary source material in English and other Western languages.

I would emphasize the troubling developments in Great Britain and France (and here in the US) which represents a fourth challenge. The criminalization of access and possession of jihadi-salafi media could relegate the study of global jihad movements to the interests of national security. Under such laws any scholarly research could be called into question by security organizations, creating an environment where scholars are at the will of security agencies for access to such material. Any effort to disengage jihad studies from its utilitarian function could founder in the face of draconian laws against the collection and storage of jihad media.

I’m certain others are more sanguine about the future prospects of jihad studies, and would welcome any contrarian opinions (I’m opening up the comments section below). I'm pessimistic about the future of jihad studies, because I see it through the lens of nearly two decades in a long-established profession (library science). With its own professional schools, associations, peer-reviewed publications, etc, library science offers numerous formal outlets to exchange new ideas, recruit young talent and adapt to changes. Jihad studies faces its own challenges, but without a clear identity or organizational cohesion.

Why does this matter? Professional societies provide leadership and accountability needed to identify challenges and redirect financial and intellectual resources to tackle them. For example, library science professionals faced tough challenges to their relevance throughout the 1990s. It also faced a demographic crisis that I discussed in my book in 2000. The profession survived both crises primarily because professional associations focused financial and intellectual resources to address them. Now, library science rpofessional once again face difficult crises, and its anyone’s guess what will happen, but the social infrastructure is in place to address them. I see none of this for jihad studies.

Jihad studies has no association, no professional leadership, and no financial support mechanism. Any effort to strengthen the profession should begin with the creation of a scholarly society, and an accountable leadership that seeks to advocate, raise funds and begin to address issues such as state attempts to control access to jihad media, and the recruitment and retention of ambitious scholars. I’m not claiming this would be easy -- the legal, financial hurdles are immense -- but I’m not sure there is any other way to do it.

Scholars drawn to study the global jihad movement are few, because of its breathtaking demands: knowledge of foreign languages, history, religion, politics, and foreign policy are essential to the general approach to jihad studies. The scope of knowledge (multidisciplinary, operational, quantitative and qualitative) required to command basic facts is exhausting. The daily research required to maintain a grasp of the movement’s global ebbs and flows is daunting. Yet the few drawn to it love it, and I suspect, would dedicate much of their waking lives to it if they had the opportunity. It may be an elite, but it’s an elite dedicated to a new profession that deserves a future. However, I’m concerned that time may have already run out on the hope of their ever being a scholarly profession that is dedicated to the study of the global jihad movement.

Update #1: I notice that some commenters (via Twitter and e-mail, too) equate jihad studies with that of the study of militancy and terrorism. I understand militancy and terrorism as studies in behavior and social science, not jihad studies. The confusion is understandable because jihad studies is often integrated into the study of militancy and terrorism for obvious reasons. That confusion goes to the heart of the problem: what is jihad studies? Without an answer, any definition will do.

Also note that distinquishing jihad studies from other related disciplines doesn't reject the validity of other disciplines or the need for an interdisciplinary approach. On the contrary, a defined discipline can easily integrate other disciplines into its ontology. For instance, many of my early professors of medieval English participated in archeological digs in the UK. Archeology has a legitimate place in the qualitative study of medieval civilization. However, jihad studies doesn't have an ontology (yet).

March 31, 2010

Dissatisfied with the programs Lockheed has delivered so far, the FBI issued a partial stop-work order on March 3 so that problems could be addressed.

In tests of parts of the new system under development, 82 percent of users reported it made their tasks much harder to complete than under existing practices.

One user said it took more than four minutes to attach a picture to a file and the process could not be stopped once started. Additionally, 91 percent of testers reported that messages to other FBI employees failed to go through.

January 31, 2010

Last week President Obama noted that Bin Laden’s latest video was a sign of the group’s weakness. Of course, former President Bush said the same thing for years. To be fair, President Obama is simply echoing the current “Beltway” wisdom, embodied in the ironically named blog, Outside the Beltway:

Presuming that Osama is still alive and the tape is genuine, it’s quite interesting that he’s now reduced to bragging about horribly botched operations to bolster his credibility.

This post at Politics Daily is a good compilation of the profound analytical wisdom of the season:

The Associated Press quoted a senior U.S. intelligence official as saying there is "no evidence whatsoever" that bin Laden had any involvement in the bombing plot or even know about it in advance. Abdulmutallab told federal agents after his capture that he had been equipped with the explosives and trained by an al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Pensinsula.

Predictions of al-Qaida’s decline come and go with the seasons, but there are so many horrible flaws in this “conventional wisdom” here that it’s hard to know where to start, but I’ll pick two:

Osama bin Laden has claimed responsibility for the failed bombing of a Northwest airliner on Christmas. That's not surprising, but what should be is that it took him nearly a month to do so. Either it took all of that time for news of the plan to reach him, or he's lying. And if he's lying, we need to consider that the man is completely irrelevant.

So op sec can't explain it, Bob? Really? Bin Laden could just have easily known about the plot all along. It took a while for a messenger to reach him. He then had to compose a message, record it, and have the courier deliver the message to Al-Jazeera. It was released along with another message to the American people. Couldn't he have been doing a few media "appearances" simultaneously?

In reality it wasn’t a failed attack. It was a wild success, and is probably a new inspiration for those working toward an even wilder success. A terrorist’s primary means of creating terror is to employ the element of surprise. They do this by undermining an adversary’s defenses. Ninety percent of al-Qaida’s operational planning against US targets consists of finding ways of defeating our defenses. Defeating an adversary’s defenses is one way of “striking terror” their hearts even when no boom is heard.

Al-Qaida broke through our defenses on December 25, 2009, and quite easily, by the way. For Bin Laden and Zawahiri it was a spectacular success.

2) Bin Laden (aka "al-Qaida central") had nothing to do with the plot, or as Max Fisher notes:

The Flight 253 attacker was guided by officials from the Yemen-based offshoot of al-Qaeda; experts have long presumed that bin Laden is either hiding out in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region or is in fact dead.

Why? Because it was perpetrated by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), supposedly a “largely independent” affiliate. Really? Largely independent? What does that mean? From the beginning AQAP has had direct and substantial connections to its central leadership. Its founder - Yusuf al-Uyyeri – sought Zawahiri’s approval of a plot to set off a poison gas in the NYC subway in 2003. It was a private audio by Zawahiri -- asking for money -- found on an AQAP operative in Saudi Arabia in 2008. AQAP is al-Qaida.

I wish I could end this rant on a positive note, but I see the Beltway conventional wisdom working its delusional magic in the face of a looming threat. For a brief moment after 9-11, the Beltway wisdom was on the ball. But 9-11 was a long, long time ago in Beltway years, and it's so much easier to just sleep.

January 10, 2010

These past few weeks have seen an avalanche of annoying second guessers, awkward mea culpas and an insidious slow-bleed of embarrassing information on bureaucratic missteps preceding AQAP's failed operation against Flight 253. If you google "intelligence failure" at google news you can see how this is playing out in the American media. Not pretty.

The poor folks at Waq-al-Waq have been paddlingupstream against a current of idiocies. They deserve a round of applause.

My favorite report of the Flight 253 cycle comes via FoxNews. Is it accurate? I have no idea. Is it plausible? Oh, hell, yes!

In the end, it was the usual bureaucratic nonsense that happen here, not a failure of "proper analysis" (whatever that is).

Lost in the cacophony of Flight 253 hysterics, was a recent Playboy article that explores another massive intelligence failure, albeit a woefully under-covered intelligence failure. Back in December 2003 the entire IC was jacked up on a perplexing threat. I can remember various high-level meetings and briefings, and a general sense of doom around the office. Well, Playboy Magazine, has an article on the massive intelligence failure that precipitated that moronic slip into hysterics. Warning: it is a Playboy article and probably won't make it past employer internet filters. Open it at home.

In a related, if under-reported, story: the December publication of a stinging report on the state of our intel capabilities in Afghanistan by Major General Flynn, et al, has caused a bit of a fuss in the blogoshere.

Mike -- aka my boss at Current Intelligence -- makes a good point about the dangers of COINophilia.

Defense strategy is not my game, but can I make a suggestion? The floundering Afghan strategy may also be a symptom of another failure. If I'm not mistaken, preparing for two simultaneous wars was a strategic imperative of 90s-era Pentagon policy. Well, 2001-present has seen just such a situation, but we've been woefully unable to balance the two. What happened to the two-war strategy?

November 11, 2009

Despite numerous arrests, convictions, reports of recruitment activities, and general vile behavior, the United States' small but very vocal Salafist-Jihadist (SJ) community saw its first inspired terrorist attack on US soil last week at Fort Hood. Numerous British and US reports paint a picture of a man who was active in this small, mostly virtual community. As Jarret (and Jihadica and Jawa Report) report, Hasan's violence has been met with elation in the US SJ community and on English language jihadi forums:

Bottom line up front: On the English-language, pro AQ websites, Nidal Malik Hasan’s attack at Ft Hood is being hailed as a victory for Islam and al-Qaida. The participants involved in the discussion see this as the opening shot in what they hope to be a long and bloody war in the United States.

These reports also highlight the key role of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American scholar of Islamic law who was once touted in the local press as a young, moderate leader of Northern Virginia's burgeoning suburban Muslim community. This while the FBI was investigating his connections to several of the 9-11 hijackers. Interestingly, anyone who has been monitoring the US-based SJ community was well aware of the centrality of Awlaki's role in it. After he fled the United States, he landed in Yemen and has been running an "American"-language blog (written in prefect idiomatic American English) since 2007-2008 (I'm working from memory here). His posts, audio and video commentaries, and fatawa, were prominently displayed throughout the US-based SJ community. That he has only now come to the awareness of many in the military and intelligence communities, is more evidence of the appalling mediocrity and endemic bureaucratic indifference that defines the policy and analysis industries here in Washington, DC.

Since it emerged in earnest back in 2005-6 with a collection of blogs and websites, America's SJ virtual community has expanded its presence to include active members of Scribd,Archive.org, and Youtube. However, it appears to be more talk than action. Reports following the arrest of Tarek Mehanna and 2 associates, make this small circle of terrorist wannabes appear to rather hapless. Most of the global SJ action remains in the Middle East and South Asia. Arabic and Urdu are still the primary languages of SJ ideology. The US network's only real religious authority has been the commentary and fatawa of al-Awlaki.

The Fort Hood attack has changed all this, however. It's clear that Hasan was very active in the US SJ community. He communicated with al-Awlaki, and there are now reports that he was talking to others as well. His 2007 power point presentation on Islam is the crystallization of the SJ ideology, expressed in American English, intended for an American audience.

There is good news here, if you can call it that. Hasan's attack may have happened too soon in the SJ community's development. The community still lacks authoritative heft it needs to be taken seriously inside the global movement (like a "Blind Sheikh"). By "coming of age" too soon, it may doom itself to jihadi caricature. That may change in the next 5-10 years as recently convicted Salafist-Jihadis are released from prison, having had many years to study and delve deeper into the justifications for violence. It's hard to predict what if any will be the impact of this cadre of radical American Muslims with prison cred, but I can practically guarantee that it will shock our policy and intelligence communities.

February 21, 2009

It's an old video, but the online jihadi who posted it to share amongst his forum friends probably did the unintended service of reminding us of the continuing jihad in Western China. Uighurs represent a sizable portion of the foreign jihadis picked up or killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan (there were numerous ones profiled in the jihadi hagiography, Martyrs in a Time of Alienation)

Regardless of how "well" things are going for the jihad in Western China, I think it's safe to say that we have no idea how it's going. The Communist Chinese government is never going to honestly report on it, and there are few, if any, independent journalists working the region. Practically all the open source analysis I've seen on jihad activity in the region relies on official Chinese government news sources. Notice how there haven't been any reports of arrests or thwarted plots since the Olympics? Any analyst-- government or otherwise -- who relies on these "news" reports must be met with a kind nod of the head and a whole lot of skepticism.

There are a few "slice of life" blogs about Western China, and they give you a general idea about the state of life in the region, but these are not bloggers looking for or reporting on conflict. There are none.

November 23, 2008

Update (11/25/08): Apparently, I'm not the only blogger viewing the new NIC 2025 report with a healthy dose of skepticism. Dave Schuler at Outside the Beltway: "Unfortunately, I think James has been altogether too kind in his assessment of the report. Whatever the cost of preparing it might have been, it wasn’t worth it." And Shlok Vaidya: "Frankly, it’s not worth the hard drive space."

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I notice that Thomas Barnett is about as excited with the new NIC as I am. He says it all.

It's just so unimaginative and reflects the NIC talking to a lot of stale academics who trot out their analogies to 19th-century colonialism and balance-of-power politics while completely discounting the profound economic--and especially financial--interdependence (the latter currently on display big time).

The report itself reads like the practice scenarios I studied for my book (now out of print, alas!). Let's see, I read The Art of the Long View in 1997. That makes some of these fresh ideas, oh, about ten years old.

I love this one:

The potential for conflict will increase owing partly to political turbulence in parts of the greater Middle East.

Now that is risk taking! The report's discussion of the role of religion could be construed as offensive, if it wasn't so clueless:

If religious structures offer vehicles to resist globalization, they also help people cope with those same forces, enhancing social stability and economic development. Without religious safety nets, the degree of chaos and fragmentation in developing nations would be far worse. As predominantly rural societies have become more urban over the last 30 or 40 years, millions of migrants have been attracted to larger urban complexes without the resources or infrastructures to provide adequate healthcare, welfare, and education. The alternative social system provided by religious organizations has been a potent factor in winning mass support for religion.

Ah yes, the opiate of the masses. How very innovative.

I'd also like to point out that the document is very slow to load from the ODNI server. This is, I suspect, a traffic management issue that should have been anticipated.

July 07, 2008

Baghdad: Some groups of Al Qaida terror network in Iraq have started leaving the country towards other hot spots in Africa like Sudan and Somalia, security sources tell Gulf News. A key reason behind the change in strategy by the so-called Al Qaida Organisation in Mesopotamia is the intensity of the latest military strikes launched by Iraqi and US forces against the network, which has been the major challenge to restoring the stability of Iraq, the sources said....A source at Iraqi Ministry of National Security said that documents and letters found in hideouts of "some elements of Al Qaida" during search operations in Sunni suburbs in Baghdad, which were previously under the control of Al Qaida, "prove these elements left Iraq for Somalia and Sudan". The information, which could not be confirmed by independent sources, could represent a victory for the Iraqi government, headed by Nouri Al Maliki..

Milan, 7 July (AKI) - The President of the northern Italian city of Milan, Filippo Penati, has triggered widespread debate with a controversial proposal to fine Muslims who pray on the streets outside the city's mosque. According to authorities, the number of people praying on the sidewalk creates traffic and obstacles for pedestrians in the area surrounding the Viale Jenner mosque, a converted garage.

Rome, 7 July (AKI) - Abdellatif Ibrahim Fatayer, one of the men convicted of hijacking the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, was freed in Rome on Monday. Fatayer, who was born in the Tel al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp north of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, is the youngest of the hijackers. According to the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, Fatayer was expected to be deported from Italy after serving a 21-year sentence plus three years under police surveillance. But Lebanon refused to accept him after he was freed from jail.

Khar, 7 July (AKI/DAWN) - Pro-Taliban militants in Pakistan have established Sharia or Islamic courts in the Bajaur tribal region which borders Afghanistan. A large number of people are believed to be waiting to use the courts established by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan in order to resolve disputes instead of waiting for action by the tribal administration. The courts have been functioning for a couple of weeks in the Sewai area, about 20 kilometres northwest of Khar, the regional headquarters of Bajaur tribal region.

IntelFusion links to a current article at ISN Security Watch by Adrian Woolridge, "Rational actors: secular fallacies," that sums up one of the dramatic weaknesses in our foreign policy: our "inability to take faith seriously":

The Boykin affair offers an especially vivid example of the confusion that reigns where religion and foreign policy intersect, which they do quite routinely these days. Opinion elites have long been accustomed to ignoring religious belief altogether. This blinded them to one of the most important developments of the past 40 years, what Gilles Kepel has called "le revanche de dieu."

So, lately - and particularly in the aftermath of 11 September - these same elites have been overcompensating for their past error, at once exaggerating and caricaturing the role of religion in world affairs. The twin errors are both fruits of the same poisoned tree: the foreign policy establishment's refusal, or simple inability, to take faith seriously.

I'll be the one to add the West's intelligence communities to his list.

Woolridge honestly notes that the common mindset of Western foreign policy and diplomatic elites that religion is a personal affair is "now hopelessly antiquated."

Religion is today on display everywhere - in the overflowing megachurches of American suburbs, in the revival of beards and veils in Islamic communities, in the daily headlines of every newspaper...And, yet, despite all this, and long after it became clear that the turbulent priests had returned to the public square, Washington's diplomats and think-tankers remained locked in a Westphalian box - obsessed with the balance of power or the pursuit of economic interests or the clash of secular creeds.

This can also be said about the mindset of the Western intelligence communities, where the antiquated, 20th century mindset still informs basic approaches to threat analysis. In this environment religion is dismissed as irrational, and the hard sciences are deemed objective. There's also an unwarranted fear of mixing God with government, and a fear of appearing to be intolerant, or of violating the ever-moving goal-posts of what constitutes proper multicultural speech.

Woolridge also notes that the void of religion within the foreign policy elite (my phrase) can cause "over-correction." Pretty soon, religion is analyzed into "caricature." In the intelligence community, this penchant for caricature, leads policymakers and the analysts who serve them, to dismiss what the enemy actually says. They inaccurately describe it as propaganda, and ignore it in calculations. They breeze past the camel in the room, on their way to a conclusion that doesn't make them stammer with discomfort.

The BIG problem here is that when godless bureaucrats attempt to tackle God the results are generally ineffective, sometimes awful. They'll hire anthropologists and psychologists to discuss the scientific basis of religion. This approach is apparently more rational than, say, hiring theologians, who think and talk about God for a living. A few may have an aha! moment and invite the pastor of their Unitarian church to talk about "faith traditions," as if Wicca and Salafist-Jihadist current share something in common. Even worse, they'll hire the "moderate" radical Islamist front groups -- "modicals," as I call them -- to inform classrooms of analysts about the Islam, giving access to key individuals in the intelligence community to members of groups that are fundamentally hostile to American civilization.

None of this supports analysis. Quite the opposite, it just injects confusion into volatile environment that is over sensitive to analytical conclusions. The outcome is not a better understanding of the enemy, but rather a further weakening of credibility and confidence.

May 28, 2008

Things WMD-related always pique my interest since it was an area of study way back when. And so I was curious when some eager online jihadi posted "Nuclear Jihad -- The Ultimate Terror" at the Clearinghouse on Monday night. Several things were clear from the original Monday posting, and after viewing the video:

This wasn't Al Qaida

These weren't even well-trained amateurs

They had no technical understanding of nuclear weaponry

There wasn't any threat related to it

And so within an hour of seeing the post, downloading and viewing the video, I forgot about it. I was surprised to see that the video made Drudge the following night. First, I assumed the video being announced was something new, because Al Qaida has an MO with its media products, and there was nothing in the information streams that resembled their MO. Second, the video was such a piece of crap that no one could possibly interpret it as a threat. Right?

It's still unclear exactly what went wrong on the analysis side of the house, but I suspect that at least part of the reason has to do with the rather unsophisticated opinion most policymakers have of terrorist information found in open source. The expectation is that open source data behaves just like classified data, only it's worthless because everyone can see it. Thus when a (real) al Qaida video or audio tape is pulled off "the Internet" -- that strange and wondrous thing that delivers e-mails to the Blackberry -- it's only understood in very abstract way.

Without an appreciation of open source characteristics such as context and content, an analyst is merely going to interpret the information given, as is, and will probably get it wrong. The fact is open source is a world in and of itself. It has its own characteristics and applications outside of the classified world of managed and controlled snippets of raw intel and formal analysis. When the two world's collide you get whatever it was that happen over the past two days.

This probably wasn't a "prank," just a completely preventable case of the analytical meltdown in action.

May 26, 2008

A brief survey of some of the more interesting items that showed up on my feed reader tonight.

From the adminisphere. UPI reports on the FBI's "adminisphere" doing what it does best -- chasing good people out. In this case it's an order that requires all ambitious special agents to work at FBI's DC headquarters for two years pushing paper before moving into higher positions of authority. This rule is about as stupid as the one in place when I was there that prohibited analysts from transferring out of the counterterrorism division. Looks like the results are the same:

"The fact that everything has to be decided at headquarters has caused a major problem," one agent told the Times. "I can tell you, many experienced supervisors are bailing out, taking their retirements or leaving early rather than uprooting their lives to move to Washington where very little actual investigative work is being done."

Finally. Ubiwar reports that the Pentagon has got around to defining/redefining cyberspace. Woo hoo!

May 22, 2008

Reuters reports on a Congressional hearing yesterday that included one current and one former FBI special agent. I'd like to dismiss this as so much anti-Administration posturing, but the testimony portrays reality that I experienced in my brief time there in 2003 :

The FBI said that in March, in an internal e-mail cited by Youssef, it was seeking permanent supervisors in its International Terrorism Operations Section 1 (ITOS 1), which tracks al Qaeda.

The e-mail said: "This is due to the fact that ITOS 1 is currently at 62 percent of its funded staffing level. It is critical to the (counterterrorism) mission that these positions be filled as soon as possible."

Last year the bureau assigned 12 staffers with no counterterrorism experience to work as international terrorism supervisors, Youssef said.

Many supervisors in such positions became discouraged, aware they were in over their heads, and warned other agents against taking similar posts, he said.

The cynic in me says: "Wow, they got it up to 62% staffing!" But the (former) manager in me knows that 62% of current staffing levels reflects previous years of staffing problems. It must include high turnover rates among analysts, a phenomenon I saw and personally experienced in the time I was there. As a matter of fact one of the unit managers joked with me about turnover, saying that the FBI was the farm team for the IC's analysts. That was 2003. Apparently, nothing's changed.

May 19, 2008

Over at Counterterrorism Blog Jeffrey Imm is lamenting the gaping nothing that is our government's counterideology strategy:

The Washington Times reported that: "FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III revealed during the hearing that the FBI has no counterideology response other than its 'outreach' to Muslim-American communities so they 'understand the FBI' and address 'the radicalization issue'. " Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff also said nothing is being done domestically to battle Islamist extremist ideas. The department's incident management team, he said, is focused on civil rights or civil liberties -- not fighting terrorists' ideology." "Retired Vice Adm. Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, said the intelligence community does not conduct any battle of ideas against terrorists in the United States unless there is a foreign connection."

Imm concludes with a question:

With an unresolved strategy towards an enemy that the U.S. political leadership refuses to define as other than "extremists", it is little surprise that "strategic operational planning" would leave something to be desired. But as some suggest Bin Laden's messages are sleep-worthy, key parts of the U.S. government are clearly asleep at the wheel in fighting Bin Laden's message and ideology.

What will it take to wake them up?

Imm's post reminds me of something that Mark Steyn wrote some time in 2002-03. After reading the news that the US immigration service had finally granted Mohammed Atta his student visa, Steyn wrote (paraphrased here): you can drive a plan into the bureaucratic mindset and it just bounces right off.

The answer to Imm's question: nothing. Right now, the political appointees are looking for new jobs. The government employees are waiting for the new boss. Expect a new round of political appointees to repeat the same non-answers in, say, 18 months.

May 13, 2008

Writing at National Review, Andrew McCarthy weighs in on the reasons and the consequences of the US government's recent decision to avoid terms like "Islam" or "jihad" while combating Islamic terrorists fighting a jihad.

As policy, DHS gives us rose-tinted category error. It confounds Islam with Muslims and non-violence with moderation. There are about 1.4 billion Muslims in the world and the majority of them would not come close to committing a terrorist act. But their rejection of jihadist methods is not an en masse rejection of jihadist goals. Similarly, the belief that America should become a sharia state, which is not all that uncommon among even American Muslims, is not a moderate one, even if a Muslim who holds it is not willing to blow up buildings to make it so. And even if most Muslims resolve the tension between their faith and modernity by choosing to take scriptures non-literally, or by marginalizing their violent directives as relics of a bygone time and place, that makes those Muslims peaceful people; it does not make Islam a peaceful religion. Where combating Muslim terror is concerned, Islam is a hurdle you need to get over, not a means by which you get over the hurdle.

In short, under the guise of prescribing how our government officials should speak “strategically” so as not to offend potential allies in the Muslim world, the new guidance (and, importantly, the government ethos that produced it) is transparently intended to sell Americans on the Islam of DHS’s dreams, not the Islam we actually have to deal with.

May 12, 2008

For decades it appeared that radical, leftist academia had triumphed utterly in practically every discipline of the humanities and social sciences. But nothing lasts forever. I see here and there little signs of life in the resistance to its influence whether it is the recent establishment of ASMEA (see Bernard Lewis' address to the first annual conference) or the ongoing response to weak, ineffectual military history highlighted at the Chicago Boyz blog:

Looked at from the perspective of what the academics are doing, it sure looks bleak. But that is only part of the picture. I believe it is an increasingly irrelevant part of the picture. In fact, I don’t know how much good it would do to have the current population of academia teaching this history.

May 11, 2008

I've linked to the invaluable work of Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo in the past. When it comes to Al Qaeda's media operations and strategy, they are two of the best analysts out there.

Abu Aardvark reports that their work was tossed under the bus for that all-purpose government contracting excuse, "budgetary shortfalls."

That's right: the US government is cutting loose one of its best analysts of al-Qaeda's use of the internet in order to save money which doesn't even amount to a rounding error in the Pentagons budget. Whether it's because of the fall of the dollar or because of the costs of Iraq, or more narrowly because of the Broadcasting Board of Governors need to pay the bills of the al-Hurra TV white elephant, this speaks volumes about both our real resource constraints and our real priorities.

It's always hard to say why a good project ends. There's often a confluence of reasons. A few that I can pull off the top of my head:

Government is slowly moving into hibernation, waiting for the new administration. Key political positions are emptying and career bureaucrats are "acting" in their stead. The bare minimum of work is being done.

Summer is coming (when nothing gets done in DC anyway), and

There's also the inevitable end of the fiscal year budget (with no real FY 09 budget in sight)

And of course, there's always cases of leadership clashes and personality issues, but more often than not it's bureaucratic lethargy.

May 06, 2008

I think a drink is in order. I raise a virtual flute of prosecco to the Muslim Brotherhood on the 80th anniversary of their founding. Happy Anniversary, er, enemy.

"As far as I remember," Hassan al-Banna writes in his memoirs, "it was the month of Ziqadah, 1347 and March 1928 when six friends... came to see me." Standing around a school house in the Egyptian city of Ismailiya, the six friends implore him to establish a group. "It is for you to guide us," he recalls them saying. He accepts their sincere offer and as he writes:

Consequently, the oath of allegiance was taken by all of us. We determined on solemn oath that we shall live as brethren; work for the glory of Islam and launch Jihad for it.

He goes on to lay out the foundational idea of the group,

"The basis of our unity and organization should be our ideology and faith. Our moral thinking and particular way of its implementation. We are united to serve the cause of Islam..."

They decided on a name: Al Ikhwanul Muslemoon.

"Thus with the co-operation of these six gentlemen, the first organization in the name of al Ikhwanul Muslemoon came into existence. Its emergence was sudden and simple and its aims and object were those defined above.

Eighty years later the grand children of the early Ikhwan are active across the globe. Considering the history of the group -- crackdowns, imprisonments, persecutions, exiles, and executions throughout the decades -- you have to give credit where it is due: they are resilient. Why? What makes the Ikhwan so formidable? Taking the group's history into account it may be possible to piece
together a Western answer.

Part of the answer lies in its history of
confrontation with tyrannical Arab regimes. Dictatorships are by their nature weak governments, with weak political and social institutions revolving around the personality and ego of a single man who will suffer no rivals. Throughout its history the Ikhwan has succeeded in confronting these regimes by slowly, strategically infiltrating the weak political institutions around them. In so doing they take root, like weeds in a sidewalk, in the weakest sections, and grow out through influence. This is why when the dictator comes around to "rooting out" the group, their efforts are so ugly, so brutal, and so all-encompassing.

When some Ikhwan members fled West, they encountered a different kind of tyranny in their eyes. The Christian character of the West is antithetical to Islam and its practice. Western secular governments may be indifferent to Ikhwan members as such, but the day-to-day lives of people are still informed by Christian sensibilities, and this is an assault to the fundamental practice of Ikhwan's Sunni brand of Islam. After all, if Christ is risen from the dead, then Islam is not possible.

Still, western secular governments generally have practiced benign indifference to Ikhwan activities. So what's a group born of confrontation to do when there's nothing to confront? They still need to survive and thrive, and so they've mastered another tactic, fitnah. The general definition is anarchy or strife, but it's also used to describe disagreement, schism, chaos, and civil war.

If their goal is survival and growth then there is no better way to do it then to identify the weakest parts of Western society and take root. For this, they have identified the most secular (and thus in their eyes the weakest) social institutions they can find -- academia, government, media, and even secularized forms of Christianity and Judaism -- and have stretched out their roots. And weak they are, after decades of post-modernism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. Our political and social institutions have softened their once-powerful authoritative and intellectual foundations.

By establishing credentials and building relationships within perceived weakening systems of power, they can cause fitnah among their enemy when they need to. This is in part what we see when the occasional commentator or analyst has the temerity to speak up about the real motivating factors animating our enemy. The institutional leadership chastises, berates, even casts out, those who say something.

However from their perspective, Ikhwan members don't distinguish between leaders and followers both are the same enemy. Fitnah allows them to have the enemy do the fighting for them.

This may help explain why they have been so successful at drawing the analyticalframework on which our government confronts the enemy. Just as their doctrine and practice are becoming apparent to us, the Ihkwan has moved to have the institutions themselves stifle any further inquiry. And they have been astonishingly successful in their efforts. In the face of mountains of facts and figures, dot-connecting that even a child could do, we see the leadership of political and social institutions simply ignore it all in an effort that is perplexing as it is depressing. Good guys: 0, Ikhwan: 5.

The problem of course is that they can only keep this up for so long. Eventually, the truth outs itself. This has become apparent in the Roman Catholic Church where the perceived secularizing weakness of the "spirit of Vatican II" was replaced with Pope Benedict's speech at Regensberg. The enemy's response? First, violence. That was unsuccessful. Now they are going to participate in a dialog on the Church's terms in the hopes, I guess, of finding some other crack in which to take root. Let's call this Trinitarian God: 1, Ikhwan: 0.

For those of us who get it to one degree or another, I can honestly say that we're losing. Badly. And so I think a drink is in order. To the enemy! May you not survive another year longer!

March 27, 2008

RAND Corp recently released an excellent report on the current state of our intelligence community. Here's one line that stood out for me:

As Rob Johnston, a rare anthropologist who turned his attentions to the Intelligence Community, thanks to the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, has found, most training is on-the job training.

Update:

Gabriel Schoenfeld reminds readers of the every-day reality of being a government intel analyst and managing them:

The lesson here is that, try as one might to persuade people working in large organizations to cooperate for the common good, nitty-gritty career incentives will always and forever trump everything else.

October 24, 2007

Congressional Quarterly has a report on a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday on the FBI progress, or lack thereof, in transforming its capabilities to fight terrorism. It includes this list of "problems stemming from the FBI’s resistance to change," compiled by committee staff:

• Field intelligence groups lack clear guidance on their mission, are poorly staffed, are generally lead by special agents and are often surged to other FBI priorities.

• Only two of 24 senior intelligence officer positions have been filled over a three year period.

• The FBI still has no ability to electronically store and share images and audio files associated with their intelligence investigations.

• Only 60 percent of the counterterrorism supervisory special agent positions have been staffed, and more than 23 percent of the supervisory special agent positions in charge of al Qaeda-related cases remain vacant.

• The FBI’s top counterterrorism position has been held by seven different FBI special agents in the last five years.